CASOS 2006 Summer Institute

June 12 - 18, 2006

Who participates? Participation is open
to graduate students, faculty, and personnel from industry and government.
Due to space restrictions we are limited to approximately 35 attendants
per year.
Registration Fee:

The purpose of the CASOS summer institute is to provide an intense and
hands-on introduction to dynamic network analysis and computational modeling
of complex socio-technical systems. Both network analysis and multi-agent
modeling will be covered. Participants will be able to complete the institute
without programming skills or in-depth understanding of particular social
theories. Computer programming and basic social or organizational theory are
not included under the topics covered.

Participants learn about current trends, practices, and tools available for
social networks analysis, link analysis, simulation, and multi-agent modeling.
Basic social network and dynamic network representations, statistics, analysis
and visualization techniques are covered.Techniques for designing, analyzing,
and validating computational models with and without network components are
presented. There is also an emphasis on appropriate and inappropriate ways to
critique computational models and network analyses. The strengths and weaknesses
of computational and network approaches to examining complex socio-technical
issues are discussed. Multiple computational platforms are explored and hands-on
experience are provided.An examination of social network methods, complexity theory
and procedures for integrating network-based metrics and statistics into computational
models completes the program.The platforms students will work with include ORA, AutoMap,
Construct, and UCINET.

Students are encouraged to bring their own data and to learn to use these tools to
code, analyze, reason about and visualize there data.
Students will work through a tool chain where they extract networks from texts, analyze
those networks, and the using simulation techniques evolve those networks.

Institute Curriculum:

The curriculum builds on both social network and computational analysis
techniques, and illustrates how to use these techniques to study social,
organizational and policy issues.